Letter: Hurtful descriptions

Writer Jane Stern begins her article telling the reader that she is walking around Michael’s Crafts talking out loud to herself about sesame noodles.

She is a food writer after all. The concern is that Stern later uses terms that are offensive and unnecessary to describe people with mental illness.

For example, “Years back if you saw someone walking alone in public having an animated discussion it was a pretty sure guess they were nuts and talking to the voices in their head.”

Sterns goes on to say, “At Michael’s, I was not on the phone, and while I may not have crossed the threshold to Crazyville, I was rather loudly debating with myself a thorny issue concerning sesame noodles. I tried to make myself feel better by thinking that truly nutty folks would be talking about the CIA spying on them, or alien abduction, but not noodles.”

While I believe that there was no malicious intent, Stern could have chosen her words a bit more circumspectly.

So many people suffer, even today, due in part to pejorative terms, and outdated thinking such as this piece contains in its lead.

Let’s not perpetuate negative stereotypes toward some of our most vulnerable citizens. We know better than that now.